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Businesses of all sizes can benefit by automating all aspects of their sales processes with an SFA (Sales Force Automation) solution. But due to the sheer number of features that most SFA solutions...Read More

If you're wondering which CMS is the right one for your organization, this comprehensive guide will take you through the various options available, detailing the pros and cons of each. Download...Read More

Considering a new phone system for your business? The Phone System Buyer's Guide from VoIP-News provides you with all of the information you need to make a more informed decision. The Guide helps you...Read More

Carrefour and Teradata and More...

Ah, here's a dateline from First Coffee's old stomping grounds, Istanbul, with the news that Teradata Corporation has announced that European retailing behemoth Carrefour is expanding its Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse environment to support business analytics within its marketing department.

Teradata's products are used by Carrefour to help with marketing activities for over 14 million households, more than half of all French households. Teradata officials say Carrefour is using the tools to try to get "a 360-degree real-time view of its customers across multiple customer contact channels, most notably its brands, hypermarket and supermarket retail stores." Basically the Teradata stuff's giving Carrefour's marketing folks the capacity to manage volumes of data, deployment and the option to process and extract data for business users.

Carrefour officials claim "the largest customer behavior database in France in terms of information management capacity and customer data history." Teradata officials said at this time, "many organizations are integrating enterprise data and updating their information infrastructures."

With its total of 1,230 stores in France the company has massive data volume issues, due to the convergence of the data from its hypermarkets and supermarkets. Carrefour officials say part of the reason they got something like the Teradata product was to support new business initiatives and its concomitant service demands -- while dealing with all the data they already had. Their new enterprise intelligence platform permits a more detailed analysis of data relating to consumer behaviour and purchasing, Carrefour officials say, while allowing for management of various marketing campaigns.

Carrefour brand marketers need to be able to manage over 60,000 customer categories and more than 14 million households within its hypermarkets and supermarkets. The retailer gets an average of 50 visits per year, or one visit per week per customer, who purchases from approximately 20 to 25 product lines, with nearly 80 percent of spending with the Carrefour loyalty card.

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Mojix has announced a partnership with SRA International, which sells technology and consulting for Radio Frequency Identification-enabled products, mainly to government organizations.

Using the capabilities of the Mojix STAR system and SRA's expertise in "enterprise logistics, Auto ID programs and government supply chain optimization," the two companies can develop products "built on the capabilities of the Mojix STAR system to government customers," says Ramin Sadr, CEO & Founder, Mojix.

"We look forward to applying SRA's capabilities and deep knowledge of the government supply chain to help clients realize the new value derived from solutions built on the Mojix STAR system," said SRA Vice President and Director, Logistics, George Batsakis. "Mojix technology establishes new avenues for use cases and applications for passive RFID."

SRA's supply chain products are used, for example, in the military's Warfighter through automated asset visibility and management. SRA officials say its products are meant to streamline the deployment process, lower cost and reduce the logistics footprint. As a vendor in Automatic Identification Technology space, SRA uses RFID and Unique Item Identification technologies to manage data across the supply chain network.

The Mojix STAR system is a UHF passive RFID system using digital signal processing and an RFID systems architecture. The ability to read passive RFID tags over long range, determine tag location, and secure and authenticate tag data in one system "changes the economics of RFID," Mojix officials maintain.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Mojix was founded in 2004 by a team of former JPL/NASA scientists and engineers who thought they could apply discoveries in deep space communications to "refine the precision, reach and scope of RFID technology," according to company officials. The firm is privately held with funding from Oak Investment Partners, Red Rock Ventures and InnoCal Venture Capital. For more information, please visit.

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Autonomy Corporation has announced a new product letting businesses record and archive dynamic Web site content, designed to "address the increasing and complex regulatory requirements for businesses presenting dynamic content on the Web," company officials say.

The product combines Autonomy Digital Safe with Interwoven TeamSite to form an offering for including Web content in a comprehensive compliance policy. As Anthony Bettencourt, CEO of Autonomy Interwoven noted correctly, the need to record and produce point-in-time records of Web content for compliance requirements "is becoming a major issue at the world's largest banks, insurance companies, and retailers.

Businesses increasingly engage with their customers through online channels, of course, constantly updating and changing offers while courts and governmental regulatory bodies are demanding that businesses produce an exact record of offers and information delivered to a Web site visitor at a particular time, for use in legal matters and compliance audits. This has become increasingly difficult for businesses trying to deliver a modern Web site experience with rich media and dynamic personalized content, keeping up with all the red tape demanded by government drones moving at the speed of a particularly lazy three-toed sloth shot with a tranquilizer dart.

Autonomy uses the capabilities of its Digital Safe Archive and TeamSite Web content management for a product that helps businesses meet the compliance requirements of the modern Web -- "for example, an insurance company can now produce a record of the exact premiums it offered online to a particular segment of customers during a marketing campaign conducted several months ago," company officials say.

Digital Safe is a scalable, hosted archive service that lets customers outsource the storage and management of e-mail messages, rich-media files, audio files, instant messages, and all forms of Web content. With over ten petabytes of data under management, Autonomy Digital Safe is used by such companies as Bank of America, Charles Schwab, Deutsche Bank, eBay and others.

TeamSite's Web versioning capabilities let businesses capture snapshots of content delivered to customers at exact points in time, including rolling back to content delivered several months or years ago so it can be ingested and indexed by Digital Safe to help organizations meet strict e-discovery and audit compliance requirements, including COBS 11.8 (Conduct of Business), SEC/FINRA regulations, and the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act.

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Definitely seems to be the day for Teradata news on deals with French companies. In another announcement, the company says that Banque Accord, a vendor of payment solutions and consumer credit, has selected the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, a member of the Teradata Purpose-Built Platform Family, to launch its company-wide business intelligence initiative.

"After a review of proposals from data warehousing vendors, we turned to Teradata to provide a single source of data," says Phillippe Eymond, head of Information Management, Banque Accord, saying the review and benchmark included "tests of software and hardware scalability, workload management, high query performance, SAS and Informatica integration, and the ease of database administration."

Data from throughout the bank will be integrated in the active enterprise data warehouse and will provide "a global view of banking services, customers and operations," says Eric Jouliť, vice president Western Europe and president of Teradata France.

The Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse is a member of the Teradata Purpose-Built Platform Family, described by company officials as "a range of data warehouses allowing companies to start small and grow at an affordable price." The family is supported by the Teradata Database, and lets businesses load data and run queries within hours after delivery.

Banque Accord, a subsidiary of Auchan Group, specializes in electronic money transfers, management of cash cards and consumer credit. The firm claims around six million customers in Europe, including three million in France.

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BatchBlue Software, which sells a social customer relationship manager for small businesses and entrepreneurs, has announced that BatchBook now integrates with FreshBooks, an online invoicing and time tracking service and Shoeboxed, a receipt and business card scanning service.

The idea behind the integration of these applications, along with an existing sync with e-mail services company MailChimp, is the launch of the Small Business Web partnership, a movement described by BatchBlue officials as bringing together "like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to assimilate their products and make life easier for small businesses."

"We know our partners, we are customers of our partners and we feel very comfortable recommending them to our own customers," says BatchBlue President Pamela O'Hara. "Providing a single place to access information from these systems makes a lot of sense from our perspective."

The Small Business Web was born when representatives of the founding companies met up at this year's SXSW Interactive Festival. They realized they were already beginning to integrate with each others' products and figured that hey, even more integration would be an asset to small business owners trying to manage their data and run their businesses.

The integration features and partnerships let small businesses organize and track contacts such as customers, prospects, vendors or industry acquaintances and monitor their social media activity including blog posts, tweets and bookmarks to gain insights and turn conversations into customers as well as tie invoices, expenses and billing to account communications for faster bookkeeping and better oversight.

"I'm always on the outlook for anything that saves me time and makes my life easier," said BatchBlue customer C.C. Chapman, co-founder of new media consultancy The Advance Guard, saying BatchBook's recent integration with Shoeboxed "saves me hours of inputting data.

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